He had just enough presence of mind to choke back the prayer that tried to form. Hodge wasn’t a praying man, never had been, save in the most extreme desperation—which most certainly described this moment. But he’d felt the extra strain when Christ’s name went through his mind, and he knew, with the part of him that was still capable of analysis, that his own battlefield piety might be the thing that broke them both, and destroyed the Onyx Hall for good.
Cracking splintering shattering collapse. The Academy, Hodge thought, and knew Lune was thinking of it, too; they must not lose the Academy, which held all the knowledge they might use to craft their salvation. They could surrender any part of the Hall but that one—the Academy, and the rooms that held Hodge and Lune. Like a man caught in a trap, Hodge amputated his own leg, knowing that if he didn’t he would die where he lay. And the blood, the life, poured out of him so fast he feared he would die anyway.
Not him. The Hall. The two spirits within the London Stone, Francis and Suspiria. He could neither hear nor feel them, but if Aspell was right, they were still there. And if they died—if their spirits were torn completely apart—
This is the one fucking thing I can do for this place. I can ’old it together. And I will. No matter ’ow much it ’urts.
And so he held.
The pain ended at last—the worst of it—and tears streamed without shame down his face. Still alive. I’m still alive, and so is the Hall—for now.
It was the smallest, most pathetic shred of victory. The iron chain had been linked together at last, the final pieces of rail laid down below Cannon Street. The Inner Circle Railway was complete.
It hadn’t destroyed them—not yet. But when the trains began to make their circuit, Hodge was a dead man. Him, and Lune, and the palace: they had not enough strength among them to survive it.
Those sons of bitches were early, too. The navvies weren’t supposed to lay the last bits of track until tomorrow; he’d thought Dead Rick and the others had just enough time to see what Nadrett was doing in West Ham. If that bastard actually had some way to make his own shelter, then this suffering could end at last.
Now he wasn’t even sure he would live to see tomorrow.
The stone beneath him had spiderwebbed into a thousand pieces. His hand trembled with palsy as he pressed it against the shattered fragments, trying to push himself up—not to his feet, that was out of the question, but at least as far as his knees. There was no strength in his arm. When he heard the door open, running footsteps approach him, Hodge almost wept with relief; then Dead Rick hauled him upright, and the panic in the skriker’s eyes killed that relief entirely.
“’E’s after Lune,” Dead Rick said, fingers gripping hard enough to bruise. “But I don’t know where she is. You ’as to tell us.”
Lune. And Nadrett. How the hell had that bastard learned where she was? It didn’t matter. Alone and vulnerable, maybe shaking with weakness like Hodge, she would be easy prey. I ’ave to warn ’er. He pressed his hand against the floor, tried to reach out, but all he got was silence.
“I’ll bloody carry you if I ’ave to,” Dead Rick said, desperate.
Hodge’s voice came out a near-inaudible rasp. “You’ll ’ave to. Swore an oath; I can’t tell you where the Stone is. But lift me up, and I’ll show you where to go.”
The London Stone, Onyx Hall: September 2, 1884
Eliza followed Dead Rick’s lurching run, one hand pressed to her side as if she could push away the stitch of pain there. When they came into the Onyx Hall, there had been a terrifying moment of dislocation, as if something were trying to rip her insides clear out of her body; she and Dead Rick had fallen hard when they finally made it through, and the skriker had begun crawling before the floor settled, even though it seemed the ceiling could fall in on him at any moment.
The Goodemeades had spoken of destruction; so had Dead Rick. None of it had meant much to Eliza, until now. Until she felt their world tearing apart around her.
And now they were braving it in search of the Queen, the faerie woman who ruled over this dying place. No—in search of Nadrett, and revenge.
Hodge gestured Dead Rick to the left, then through an arch. In the distance, Eliza could hear cries of fear, the sounds of other people running. She cast a nervous glance at the walls around them, which seemed on the verge of collapse. We only need a few minutes more.
A sudden tremor sent Dead Rick sprawling. Hodge grunted in pain as he hit the floor. Eliza caught herself against the wall, then went to help the Prince. His pointing hand stopped her. “Not far. She walled ’erself in. But if Nadrett’s there—”
Eliza didn’t wait for anything more. Gripping the knife and the water so tight her knuckles ached, she ran in the direction Hodge pointed.
The first room was hung with faded tapestries and cluttered with rubbish, echoes of a forgotten past. Eliza had no eyes for them: her gaze went straight to the right-hand wall, where broken black stone formed a jagged mouth. Weapons raised, Eliza hurled herself through to the room beyond.
The woman within sat in serene perfection, eyes closed, heedless of her surroundings. Her cloth-of-silver gown was old-fashioned, with the full crinoline and sloping shoulders of decades past; it shone in the dim light of the room. She shone, pale skinned and silver haired, like some poet’s vision of the moon, and a sword was thrust into the black stone at her feet.
So arresting a sight was she, it took Eliza a full second to notice the other faerie in the room—the creature that had been the source of all her pain.
She’d expected something more. Some grand demon, maybe not horned and clawed and dripping venom, but showing outward sign of his evil. Instead she saw a faerie much like any other: dressed like a man, in the tattered elegance she associated with the leaders of gangs in the slums of London.
Holding a gun to the woman’s head.
“Stop!” Dead Rick wrenched the vial from Eliza’s grip, when she would have hurled her water at the other faerie. “Stop,” he repeated in a whisper, and she felt the skriker tremble against her back.
Nadrett’s laugh held all the malice she’d imagined in her nightmares. “That’s right, dog. You know what this means, even if that mortal bitch don’t. I pulls the trigger, and this all comes tumbling down.”
Fear roughened Dead Rick’s voice, alongside the anger. “You’ll die with us.”
“Maybe so,” Nadrett said, seemingly unconcerned. “But you ready to kill everybody else, too? No, I don’t think so. You’ve got your memories back, don’t you? Which means you remember fighting for this place. Being a good little dog for the Queen. She wouldn’t want you to throw that away, now would she?” He gestured at Eliza. “Are you ready to kill ’er, your little mortal pet?”
Dead Rick slid in front of Eliza, pushing her back with gentle, shaking hands. She retreated, thinking of that terrible dislocation as they came into the Onyx Hall. It would be like that again, if the Queen died. Only worse.
The skriker said, “What do you want?”
Nadrett’s lip curled. “Your guts on an iron platter would be a pleasant start. Or no, I’ve got a better idea—I want all of your memories gone again, all except this moment. So the only thing you remember is ’ow you failed, and fell back into being my crawling, whining cur.”
Eliza dug her fingers into the black stone of the wall at her back, gripping it as if that were the one thing keeping her from leaping at Nadrett. The malevolence of him turned her stomach. This was what had broken Owen; this was what Dead Rick had lived under for years, until the kindness and trust in him had been beaten almost to death.
Dead Rick snarled low in his throat, but said, “I mean right now. You came for Lune. You planning to walk out with ’er? Take ’er away from that? Might as well shoot ’er, and you know it.”
He’d jerked his chin upward on the word “that.” Following his motion, Eliza saw a stone in the ceiling above Lune that did not belong with the rest of the palace. It was a simple, rounded block of limest
one, pitted and chipped, scored with grooves along its tip, as if carriage wheels had ground across it for years—but it hung ten feet above their heads. Surely nothing could touch it up there, least of all carriages.
Then she realized she’d seen it before, during her costerwoman days. Or rather, a stone just like it, set into the outside wall of St. Swithin’s Church. An old relic that they called the London Stone.
“I ain’t got no interest in seeing everybody die,” Nadrett said, in answer to Dead Rick. “You ought to know that, dog; if there ain’t no fae in London, I ain’t got nobody to make a profit from. So ’ere’s what we’re going to do.
“You’re going to go out and tell everybody there’s a new place for them to live. Out in West Ham. Anybody as wants to stay in London can, so long as they pays my price. You clear them out of this place; that Prince of theirs ’as enough bread piled up to give everybody a bite. Once that’s done … You see that camera over there?”
Eliza couldn’t risk taking her attention off Nadrett, but out of the corner of her eye she could just glimpse a box on a tripod stand. “I use that camera,” Nadrett said. “I take the Queen’s soul. I carry it off to West Ham, and use ’er and that dead Prince to pour what’s left of this place into what I’ve got waiting there. New faerie realm, new ’ome for everybody. Ain’t it grand?”
Eliza’s heart lurched against her ribs. So that was how he would do it: with human souls and the captured spirit of the Queen. That was the secret they had risked themselves to capture.
Or rather, destroy.
“Sounds very grand—except for one thing.” Her voice shook: with rage, with fear, with the fruitless need to do something. She couldn’t possibly kill him before he shot the Queen. But if she made him angry enough … “We blew your machine to pieces.”
It almost worked. Nadrett snarled in fury, and Dead Rick tensed, about to throw himself forward in that moment of distraction. But Nadrett saw it, and spat a curse. “One inch, dog, and I blows the Queen’s brains out.”
Let him.
It was a stupid, reckless, suicidal thought—so Eliza believed, at first. But the tone wasn’t reckless in the least; it was perfectly calm.
And it wasn’t her thought.
The whisper ghosted into her head, and no one else seemed to hear it. Let him fire. If you can hear me … make Nadrett do it.
Madness. They would all die; Dead Rick had said so. But Eliza would have put her hand on the Holy Bible and sworn her oath to God that the whisper came from the silver-haired woman in the chair: the Queen of the Onyx Court.
Whose mind she was somehow feeling, as if the woman were a ghost she had raised.
Trust me.
The tenuous sense of connection faded as Eliza shifted forward, releasing her grip on the wall. Nadrett redirected his snarl to her. “That goes for you, too, bitch.”
In the end, Eliza was sure of one thing: that it would be better to kill every faerie in this place, even Dead Rick, and herself with them, than to let Nadrett tear people’s souls out and feed them into his terrible machine.
“Devil take you,” she said, and threw herself at Nadrett.
The sound of gunfire was deafening in the small space. Eliza never made it near her target; Dead Rick caught her, in a desperate, failed attempt to prevent disaster. But as her ears rang with the aftermath of the shot, as smoke wisped through the cool, dry air, the expected earthquake did not begin.
And Lune sat, untouched, in her chair.
Nadrett stared, disbelieving, at the Queen. So did Dead Rick; so did Eliza. The pistol was an inch from her head; he could not possibly have missed. The wall showed a fresh pockmark where the round had struck, and the line between the two went straight through her skull.
Trembling, Nadrett reached out with his free hand to touch Lune’s hair.
His fingers went right through.
“What in Mab’s name…?” he whispered.
Clinging to Dead Rick, Eliza felt the growl in the skriker’s chest, before it ever became audible. Then understanding caught up, and she released him, freeing his arm to throw.
A tiny arc of water leapt from the vial, cloudy and stinking of the Thames from which it had been drawn. In a fierce, triumphant growl, Dead Rick snarled, “Seithenyn, I name you, and mark you for death. Let the waters of Faerie carry out their curse!”
Only a few droplets of water caught Nadrett. Nowhere near enough to hurt anyone. The entire vial couldn’t have hurt a man, even if poured into his lungs. Nadrett raised his gun again, and Eliza thought they were dead; Lune might survive that, but she and Dead Rick never would. Before Nadrett’s arm made it all the way up, though, the water began to move.
Move, and grow. It twisted up from the floor, from his sleeve and collar where the droplets had landed, twining into ropes and waves. Nadrett screamed, trying to claw it away, but the water only clung to his hands, like animate tar; then, understanding, he tried to run.
He didn’t get more than three steps. The waters raged higher around him, a whirlpool binding his body tight, and in their surface Eliza thought she saw faces: beautiful nymphs, twisted hags, and through them all, the solemn, bearded face of an old man. A voice spoke, resonant but clotted with mud and filth, the voice of the Thames itself. “For the destruction you wrought, and the death of Mererid our daughter, we bring this justice upon you.”
Nadrett’s scream died in a choking cough. Then there was only rushing water; then silence, as it drained away, leaving only a damp slick on the floor.
Dead Rick spat at it. “Wanted to tear your throat out, you bastard. But they ’ad first claim.”
Sick to her stomach, Eliza turned away. To the broken edge of the wall that had closed Lune into this chamber—Lune, who was some kind of ghost. Beyond its edge she found Hodge, limp on the floor, having dragged himself almost to the Queen before his strength gave out. Eliza knelt and rolled him onto his back, fearing the worst, but Hodge opened his eyes. “Is she…”
Eliza didn’t know how to answer. Instead she slipped her arm around his chest and helped him upright, and together they staggered back into the chamber of the London Stone.
Dead Rick gestured helplessly toward the Queen. “Lune—”
Hodge stretched one hand out to the wall. Not for support; his fingers touched the stone, and he closed his eyes. After a moment, Eliza did the same.
She felt that presence again, tenuous and weak, but undeniably there. A sense of gratitude breathed over her, so painfully weary that it brought a gasp of tears into Eliza’s own throat. I began to suspect some time ago. I have poured so much of myself into the Hall, I am no longer in my body; the Hall is my body. The scholars would say my spirit has released its grip upon the aether that made it solid. I could not hold both that and the palace at once.
It was more than just words. The Queen’s whisper carried with it overtones of sensation and memory that gave Eliza vertigo: in that moment, she came untethered from human notions of time and existence, growing into something vaster and more elemental than her poor mortal mind could conceive. But then, as from a distance, she felt Hodge’s arm tighten around her shoulders, and she knew she wasn’t alone; he was mortal, too, if not entirely so, and he helped anchor her to the reality she understood, against the tide of the Queen’s ancient soul.
Whether she heard Dead Rick’s voice with her ears or her mind, Eliza didn’t know. “Your Grace. I should ’ave stopped ’im sooner—”
No need for apology. Another wash of weariness, so intense Eliza wondered how anyone, human or faerie, could bear it. I know of your purpose in West Ham. Did he have an answer? Can his … machines be used?
It must have been mental communication, for Eliza felt the surge of Dead Rick’s repugnance alongside her own. “No,” she said, and then words failed her; they did not suffice to describe the horror of what Nadrett had built.
But it seemed the Queen took the sense of it from her mind, for she felt Lune’s grim resignation. Then we do not have long. At most
, until the first train passes by the London Stone above. Perhaps not even that long. Hodge … the time has come. The Onyx Court must flit; the Hall can shelter us no more.
“No!” That was out loud, and it came from Dead Rick. Hand still on the wall, Eliza opened her eyes, and saw the skriker fall to his knees at the feet of his phantom Queen. “We can’t just bloody well give up. There ’as to be a way to save the palace.”
Hodge slipped from Eliza’s arm to lean against the stone, exhausted. His answer was flat and unyielding. “There ain’t. We’ve tried. I wish it weren’t true—but your time ’ere is done.”
The naked despair on Dead Rick’s face echoed through the stone, into Eliza’s own heart. “But this is our home.”
His words tore her in half. One piece growled that it would be good riddance; after all the evil the fae had done, London would be better off without them. No more Nadretts, stealing people and memories and souls, profiting from the misery and suffering of others. These were not godly creatures; they were alien, and unwanted. The occasional exception—Dead Rick, the Goodemeades—did not redeem the rest of their kind.
The other piece of Eliza had heard such words before—coming from men like Louisa Kittering’s father.
Maggie Darragh, starving in Whitechapel, until her anger could only express itself in dynamite. James O’Malley, who’d stolen more than a few things in his time, and other crimes besides. All the drunkards and thieves and murderers, the unwashed pestilential masses of Irish hidden away in their rookeries, where the respectable folk of London didn’t have to see them; some were bad at heart, and others were led into sin by those around them, and still others had it forced upon them by circumstance. And then there were the men like Patrick Quinn, that those respectable folk liked to forget: decent, hardworking Irish, not living in poverty, not committing crimes, but they couldn’t redeem their race in the eyes of those who judged.